Dojji

If he maintains this for another year he will definitely become interesting.

Oh well you're just wrong there. The teams that are in the wild card hunt at the end of the year and are proclaiming themselves contenders would certainly fit any reasonable definition of pseudo-contender. Your determination to hold onto distinctions that I'm not obliged to acknowledge is neither relevant nor interesting.

Agreed. Whatever happened to Bard, whosever fault it was, one thing is clear: that was a good pitcher before he went down the drain, and it's a real shame it happened so young. Personally, I don't feel it's cut and dried enough to call this mismanagement instead of a tragedy. Others are going to disagree with me there, that's fine. I personally feel like if he ever really had the health, skill and mojo to be a longterm success in the majors, what happened to him in the last month of 2011 and the first half of 2012 shouldn't have been enough to derail it. Promising power pitchers move back and forth between the rotation and the pen all the time and come out smiling. So it wouldn't be fair to call the rotation move a red herring, since damaging his arm and career was a known possible risk, but to say it was THE cause of what happened to Bard is also disingenuous. Something else happened there.

Amusingly, you just contradicted yourself with the two sentences above. Perhaps you need to refresh your etymology. "pseudo" implies falsehood -- a thing that resembles the real artlce but really isn't. So if they're not contenders, but trying to pretend they are, "pseudo-contenders" is bang on the dot to describe them.

It would occur to me then that a pseudo contender are the kind that perennially hover just outside of the playoffs but never succeed in putting on the finishing touches.

Or you can look for what Nava had -- an advanced approach in one critical area and enough skill all around that he's not going to hurt the team. In Nava's case, the one thing he is good at is OBP -- which is probably one of the best of all possible things for a player to be solely good at. And Nava is not just good at OBP, considering his lack of power. It takes elite skill to keep your OBP particularly high when pitchers aren't particularly afraid of you. And he has enough power to sting line drives and keep his consistency up and maintain his value -- as long as he never plays right field again.

We can put a prudent package together for King Felix, but the Mariners have no incentive to accept a merely prudent package.

Maybe this belongs in the prospect forum. If Yezir or YOTN want to move it there I won't object but I think it has a place in the big league forums. You guys know I love the underdog story when it comes to prospects. I've backed guys that went nowhere, like Kason Gabbard and Bubba Bell. I've backed guys that went somewhere for other organizations but were never going to get the chance here, like George Kottaras. And every now and again, I do get my moment to savor calling a guy making a contribution out of nowhere, like I have with Nava. That's always fun. But I can't rest on my laurels, so I've been looking around to see if there's another guy no one's talking about that I can get behind. I think I may have found a couple. I mentioned Dan Butler in the prospect forum. He's probably destined to go the way of George Kottaras, especially if we manage to keep Saltalamacchia's services, since he's overshadowed by more interesting prospects. Having to compete with Lavarnway AND Swihart AND Vazquez for 2 catching positions even if we do lose Salty, is an uphill fight to say the least. But this kid is to the point, both at his professional level, and in his toolbox, that he's probably going to reach the majors some way, somehow, and do it within the next 2 years. Catchers that hit .800 OPS in their first full season in AAA make the big leagues. They maybe don't become starters or stars, but you never voluntarily throw away a chance to see if you have a do-it-all catcher hiding under the leaves in your farm system -- even if he's only do-a-little-of-everything, that's better than a lot of teams have starting for them. As overshadowed as Butler is, I can't see him failing to get his chance. Too many teams are desperate for the catcher he could be. I'm sure scouts are more aware of this kid than we are. If we know what we have, and we're smart, we'll pick up our utility man of the future when we trade him -- some youngster with 3 position talent and enough skill to work the count and attain to a decent OBP. Personally though I'm hoping he gets a chance to back up for us. I'd give it a real decent chance that he'll reward us for failing to overlook him. Anywho, the other kid I see, also in Pawtucket, and another kid I've talked about before if only briefly in the prospect forums, is Alex Hassan. Honestly I'm kinda stumped as to why we haven't seen him in Boston by now. We need righthanded outfielders, check. We need corner outfielders, check. And we like to have people around who work the count, don't get themselves out, and play solid defense. Check, check, and check. To the tune of a .429 OBP in AAA with enough slugging to be interesting. Not enough to start, but we don't really need a starter, just a righthanded bat off the bench. I'm sure most people would want Brentz if Gomes went down, since, you know, righthanded power hitter to replace a righthanded power hitter, but frankly, I don't trust Brentz not to be an out factory at the big league level. Brentz has a better chance to be awesome, but Hassan has a far, far, far better chance to be serviceable.

This is true, which is one of the big reasons I hold onto Stephen Drew if I at all can. It's one thing to be confident in Bogaerts' ability to be a starting caliber SS, it's another for one of the richest teams in baseball to go count on it without a viable Plan B. I'm pretty comfortable that Cherington has been in touch with Drew's agent about trying to find some common ground. He's been useful enough to hold onto, especially if we can move Dempster (who wasn't a disaster, but isn't really needed now) and hold onto Drew with Dempster's money. If Bogaerts reprises Ellsbury's performance and makes it clear he's ready to go, we ought to fetch a decent return for Drew, just like we did for Crisp. It's a better way to run a franchise than throwing away a solid professional starting caliber PLAYER because you have a good high-ceiling PROSPECT. At least when that franchise is trying to compete every year. As for Salty? If he's willing to sign at a reasonable price I'll keep him too. We have some young depth at catcher but nothing explosive and he is, again, a solid professional catcher when you average out his strengths against his weaknesses. I don't want to go all-rookie at the catcher's position next year, so if we lost Salty and someone else nabs McCann, I think we have a problem at catcher. Lavarnway and Butler/Vazquez have the raw talent to play the catcher's position, but there's a lot more to catching than strapping on the pads and getting baseballs thrown at you. I'd be really anxious about our situation if we lost Salty, even with guys like Lavarnway, Vazquez, Swihart, and even Dan Butler who no one's heard of but is actually a very interesting catching prospect worth giving a shot at some point. There's such a thing as "too young" when it comes to catchers, much moreso than other positions.

So you're assuming the Red Sox find no way to get anything done with any of their future FA. Hey whatever makes Yankee fans sleep at night I guess.

Did you really think that wasn't factored in? That's why closers have to be more than 80% efficient in order to earn their money.

What I'd do is divorce the lineup from positional play. Basically take the DH to its logical conclusion. A team puts its best fielders in each position and its best 9 hitters in the lineup. Guys that can more than one of these things would be extremely useful due to the limited roster space and defensive specialists get a boost. Thus you have maximum flexibility to use your roster space to the fullest and defensive baseball improves because you don't have to crowd hitters into wierd defensive positions..

Pretty much. How many of those guys were around for more than 3 seasons compared to today? We have a better idea what needlessly destroys relievers arms today than we did 30 years ago, and our bullpen management (among other things) reflect the best available application of that knowledge. I'm sorry you find it personally disappointing guys, but it's not going back.

People, people, people... You have a really low opinion of people who spend their lives playing and managing the game of baseball, don't you? The fact is that the closer model works. There is no way around this. Whether you think it's the most viable solution, it is *a* viable solution. It is a system that has stood the test of real-world baseball for years and produced real-world results. You can puff and wheeze and whine about potential better solutions, but the closer model is time tested, and has been for years. Dismissing it as a fetish, or a superstition, or any other language that suggests that the model is somehow faddish or ineffective is dishonest -- and insults your intelligence more than it insults the two generations of closers that have gotten it done at the highest level of their sport. More to the point, it's worth analyzing why it works. One-inning closers produce positive wins for their team, and it's a model that's easy to implement with interchangable personnel, which is the real world situation in any given major league bullpen. It's the fact that personnel are in fact interchangable that fuels the argument against the closer, but if you look at it for more than about 2.65 seconds, you'll realize that the fact that the parts of a bullpen are interchangable is exactly why the model is effective. In a facet of the sport where the personnel change literally all the time, the role is more important than the man filling it. What that means is that the closer's model is more adaptable than people give it credit for. If you have a closer who can consistently go longer than one inning, of course you toy with the idea and let them try it, but you often don't, so you build a framework of a closer model around 1 inning performance, which most closers can handle, and then you have a system that's easy to adjust to the real situation of the 6 or 7 people you have working for you in the bullpen. Finally, the relief ace model has one really big flaw -- it effectively requires the manager to be Miss Cleo. If you're trying to save your best arm for the highest leverage situation, the question then becomes, how exactly do you know that any given situation is the highest leverage? You might have 2 out, second and third with a 1 run lead in the 6th, you bring in your stud, he gets the out, gets through the next inning, and then the guy in the 8th loads the bases with one out. Oops! Given the common meme about the intelligence of whoever your manager happens to be, expecting him to have that kind of finger on the pulse of the game is a bit of a tall order. Better to give him a modular system that allows for adjustments and usually doesn't require prescience to pull off correctly. It's a common sense adaptation that given the nature of the sport, someone was going to think of anyway. That besides the fact that establishing a heirarchy with the closer on top gives relievers something to strive to become. That's almost as important all by itself as any other consideration. The relief ace and other non-closer models are something you file right along with piggy back starters and making every game a bullpen game with no one pitching more than 3 innings. It's an idea you pull out of the hat when the situation is right for it, but it's nowhere near as robust and survivable a model as what people are already doing.

Yep. More to the point, NYY is going to have issues going after Abreu. They don't really believe in full time DH's and have a number of aging hitters, and first place is occupied for the next several years. Honestly the team that worries me when it comes to Abreu, is Oakland. This is where Beane likes to plant his flag, and I think the A's are going to be big players for Abreu.

I keep Stephen Drew. He's good enough at a rare enough position to find a good player that I don't dream of moving him on just because we have a prospect. Prospects have busted out before. If we can afford the cost in dollars, I absolutely hold onto Drew. We're not the Royals where we might have to boot an effective veteran just because a kid looks good. As for the offseason: I walk away from Napoli, bring in Abreu, with the idea of working Abreu and Carp at first and seeing what that looks like with the idea that if I do need to do something later, this franchise doesn't have a ton of other holes so it should be easy to prioritize. Resign Drew for 4 years 13M AAV. There will be plenty of room for Bogaerts even with Drew. Move Dempster. Plan A rotation: Buchholz, Lester, Peavy, Lackey, Doubront. Workman, de la Rosa Ranaudo, Wright and Webster is fine depth in the wings. We don't really need Dempster. Give him a loving home out in the AL West. The bullpen is fine. Bring in some mix and match types because a little depth can't hurt anyone but I can't imagine us failing to find 7 good pitchers with the mix of talent we already have. I make an effort to bring in Jamey Carroll in a utility role. He's a solid professional utility guy who'd be easy to push aside when Bogaerts is ready to justle for playing time, and if that doesn't happen for some reason, I'd be cool with keeping him around. He's the type that has something to teach the youngsters. Ellsbury I keep if I can, if there's a reasonable way to get that done I shift Nava before I lose out on Ellsbury. If need me Bradley can play left field and we can just suffer through the fastest outfield in the major leagues.

You would rather have seen them trot out Doug Mirabelli and Kevin Cash for the rest of the season? I mean sure the Lopez move bombed but at least you have to admit that you know why they tried it. The team was screwed well before the Massacre. The Massacre was simply when everyone had to admit it. We never really had the rotation to contend in the first place that year. Even if the rotation had played up to its listed ability you still might have seen one starter in our rotation with an ERA of under 4. Big Papi's absurd year kept us in the race far longer than we had any real right to be.

It certainly was in 07. That was the month that made the division race much more interesting than it had to be.

Disagree. The closer debate, and especially the absolute presumed truism the anti-closer side maintains, is a triumph of noise over substance. The Closer model is time tested, and proven as a viable way to use your best reliever, and no other model since Tony LaRussa introduces the modern closer has proven anywhere near as effective anywhere but in theory. The pro closer side can point to plenty of evidence that the closer's role itself is efficient as long as the closer reaches a certain threshold of efficiency. Not only that, but that threshold is over 80% and nearly every closer clears it, so any marginal gain over that threshold by the relief ace model is necessarily small -- tiny even. The fact that there are definitely bad closers in the world doesn't hurt their case either. If not everyone can do it, a specialist is beneficial. Furthermore, the anti-closer people have to deal with the fact that their model has never worked particularly well when it was tried. And it has been tried, usually by teams desperate to stretch the viability of their average or worse pen -- the Red Sox, Tigers and Guardians are teams I can think of that tried the relief ace model or some other non-closer variant, or tried putting a stopgap in the closer's role to keep their best relief arm flexible and available for when crap goes down. No team that has tried that model has gotten all the way, and the teams that have gotten the closest have done so by adopting one of their best arms as their closer by the time the playoffs start. Meanwhile teams with professional closers of all shapes and sizes get to the big show and win all the time. And what's more, teams that try the alternative methods tend to go out of their way not to have to, the following season. People remember the heroics of guys like Schilling in 2004, but I think we forget the sea change between "closer by committee" in 03 with no one really rising to the top until late in the season, compared with the job Keith Foulke did the next year. Now you can make an argument that they all failed or were abandoned because the talent in the pen wasn't good enough, but the fact is that extending the usefulness of the pen is exactly what the relief ace model is supposed to do, and it has never ever ever done it in realtime, so that's more of an excuse than a real counter, and it serves to expose the fraud that the relief ace position always turns into when tried anywhere but on paper.

And Nava's in either case are unrepresentative because of a couple months spent playing out of position.

Again,. those WAR numbers are skewed by some extenuating circumstances impacting his dWAR. He really should never be put in right, but the team needed someone to play out of position when Victorino hit the DL and it was Nava who stepped up and took one for the team. Check his UZR/150 numbers on Fangraphs, you'll see what I mean. Nava's not going to hit well enough to make up for a -29 UZR/150 figure over half his defensive sample. He really needs to stay in left field. The problem is Gomes is nearly as bad in right so the team had no choice.

The whole debate about whether Nava should be considered the starter, should, by the way, be viewed in light of the fact that he only needs to start half the remaining games this year to get to the 400 AB benchmark, which whether it's convenient for your argument or not, is usually considered where the line is drawn between starter and platoon guy. It doesn't matter what you think his flaws are, Daniel Nava has been a starting level player for the Red Sox this year. Personally I think he's held up pretty well doing the thing some of you are saying he can't do. Good on Gomes for being the righthanded platoon bat we needed to shelter ALL THREE of our seriously lefthanded outfield starters, but he's not a starter himself, he's not on pace and I don't think there's enough games left to get him on pace. That means your starters are, in some order, Ellsbury, Victorino, and Nava. BTW -- for those worried about Nava's defense, his defensive stats took a huge hit when, thanks to Victorino's injury, Nava had to play 50 games in right field, a position he had absolutely no business whatseover playing. Guys who are fringy in left are asking for it if they play extended time in right. Looking at the breakdown in Fangraphs, his UZR/150 was about -9 in left -- solidly below average, but forgivable. His UZR/150 in right field was a Mannyesque -29. Full credit to Nava for manning up enough to play out of position when his team needed him but that injury (and Gomes or Carp being unable to be better than Nava's utter butchery of right field) did not help his dWAR one bit. Thinking about that for just a second, it looks like they might need to make a move actually. We could really use one backup outfielder that can play in right if Victorino goes down. Right now we have 2 backup left fielders -- not ideal. If Victorino goes down your second man on the depth tree in right field is Nava -- in a playoff environmnent, that really doesn't bear thinking about.

The only numbers I have for Nava's baserunning put him pretty much at the same level as Dustin Pedroia -- both barely relevant as baserunners (which goes to show that aggressiveness on the paths on Pedroia's part isn't necessarily paying off) Even if you're absolutely right, not everyone on a team needs to be Vince Coleman. You're overstating the significance of the home run as a part of Boston's offensive picture -- and, IMHO, severely underrating the double. This is the best doubles park in the major leagues, this team lives and dies off the double. And when you live and die off the double, you don't need to be as aggressive on the pasepaths to score runs. Getting people on base is usually enough all by itself. If you can get Ellsbury or Victorino from first to second a bit more often that helps a bit, but for a station to station doubles team, speed is a luxury -- and it can bite you in the tail like it is for Pedroia, when a guy who could have been driven in from first on a nice bouncer down the line simply isn't on base anymore. WHen you've got very consistent offensive producers behind your speed guys, those guys need to pick their spots very carefully. This is hurting Pedroia in particular because he's one of those players who wants to "get out there and make something happen" which with this offense is frequently the worst possible idea. Nava has average speed, and he's on base enough that if the team turned him loose, he could probably swipe a base or two. He showed that he can steal 8-10 bases a year in the minors. But he doesn't have the speed that's going to beat an alert catcher with a good arm, so he's better off getting on base and staying on base for the hitters around him -- which is what he does. And it's why he's on pace for about 75-80 runs scored this year despite usually hitting down in the lineup behind the big bats.

0- 1: Nava isn't a terrible baserunner. He neither generates nor loses runs on the basepaths by attempting to employ his speed. If you want to use the WAR calculator from Fangraphs that doesn't favor Nava as much as Baseball Reference, you have to accept that Fangraphs calls Nava a pretty neutral baserunner too. You don't get it both ways. 2: This team is not built to favor aggressive baserunning. This is an OBP-and-doubles offense and given how the park tends to play offensively it kind of has to be. Home runs useful but not (and cannot be) a primary offensive strategy. Speed is a luxury for this kind of offense, players with it can become a liability if they get careless. Nava is a perfect player for that style in many respects. As it is Ellsbury, Victorino and Pedroia run into too many outs. Considering what the guys behind them are capable of they need to be danged sure before going anywhere. If our offense sucked I could see trying to generate something, but by getting his tail on base and staying parked there, Nava generates more than a few runs for the team.

I'm not sure those criticisms are enough to invalidate Nava as a starter. It's not like you run into tough lefthanders every day, or that you ask your left fielder in Boston to be a defensive wizard, and we were going to need a righty on the bench anyway because no matter what happens our outfield is going to be thick with lefthanders (plus the allegedly "switch-hitting" Victorino whose sample size against RHP is even smaller than Nava's). Look around the league and this time look past the glitzy names in the top 5-6 men in left. They're irrelevant to the argument. There's going to be about 10 big name LF that are better than an average LF on a consistent basis, 10 that are worse, consistently, and about 10 in the middle, which the average player could be anywhere on that part of the list. That's where I'd say Nava is. He's middle-10. One year he'll be 18th, another year he'll be good or the crop will be a little worse and he's up to 12th. We're not used to those guys, this is a big market "superstar at every position" team, or so it sees itself, so it's quick to dismiss the grinders, but a team can deal with a number of middle-10 players and still be a contender. As for the baserunning thing? Come on, that's irrelevant and you know it. This is a station to station doubles hitting team. That's what the park's built for, that's what the roster's built for. Not stealing your way into surplus outs is the way this team tends to need to operate anyway. A guy with a high OBP who doesn't create outs on the basepaths is perfect for how our offense actually works.